Cabbie Rawi Hage wins richest book prize

A former Montreal cab driver, Rawi Hage, has won the €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest literary prize, for his debut novel, De Niro's Game. The book, like DBC Pierre's Booker winner, Vernon God Little, was plucked from a publisher's 'slush pile' - the welter of unsolicited manuscripts received by all publishers, and often never read.  Fortunately for Hage, an editor at The House of Anansi did pick up the story - of two young men growing up during the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war - and was hooked.

Hage, 44, who is Lebanese but left the country in the 1992 to live in Canada, was working as a cabbie and wedding photographer while he wrote the book. What is more remarkable is that he wrote it in English, which is his third language (his first two are Arabic and French).

De Niro's Game had previously been nominated for prestigious literary prizes in Canada and abroad. The French edition of De Niro's Game recently won the Prix des libraries du Quebec in time for its release in France.

Clearly this has all gone to Hage's head if his rather bombastic acceptance speech is anything to go by. On hearing he had won the award, he said: "To all those women and men of letters, and all artists who have gone beyond the aesthetics of the singular to represent the multiple and diverse, to all those men and women who have chosen the painful and costly portrayal of truth over tribal self-righteousness, I am grateful. We should all be grateful." ·